How to Plan and Budget your Salesforce Implementation

The truth of business enterprise is that investing in Salesforce CRM can be categorized as one of the best decisions. Salesforce is there to create a deeper relationship with customers, which helps in the growth of business firms. The payoff, however, depends completely on the creation and execution of the Salesforce implementation as well as the integration plan.

Research has found that around 63% of CRM initiatives fail. In fact, people issues made up almost 40% of the total CRM failures, according to a Forrester survey. All these matters together include inadequate training and also change management, which ultimately leads to poor user adoption.

Hence, ensuring a successful Salesforce implementation, which will yield a faster ROI demands an implementation plan involving all the essential factors.

The more you know, the minimum number of surprises you get!!

The Salesforce Implementation Approach

Before even delving into the costs, it is highly important that you should understand your implementation options. It is a fact that software cannot get installed all by itself, so it is essential for organizations to choose from two main approaches for installation and roll out:

Do it by yourself

Consult a Salesforce, implementation consultant

The do-it-yourself approach is often said to appear less expensive for a short-term period. But it tends to be one of the most frequent causes of ruined implementation. Even in cases where an organization hires an employee solely dedicated to Salesforce, he will not have the deep implementation experience, which most of the Salesforce integration partners have.

In fact, most of the successful organizations engage Salesforce experts, who use the best practices in every implementation. All such partners have performed many implementations in different ways.

Evaluate the Factors in Salesforce Implementation Planning

Regardless of your implementation process, Salesforce should always be adapted to fit your organization and all its processes, and not the other way around. Since, Salesforce contains many possibilities, one type of plan or price will not be a fit.

There are some important questions, which will help you create an effective Salesforce implementation plan. They are the following:

What existing systems does the organization have?

What is the sales process?

What sources of data does the organization want to migrate to Salesforce?

What solutions are needed to optimize Salesforce?

Will there be an existing application or a custom solution?

How will the users and administrators receive support when they are in need of a solution?

What is the procedure for getting a support request?

Estimate Costs of Salesforce Implementation and Integration

Salesforce implementations usually come with licensing costs and as well software ownership or the leasing costs. Travel expenses may become a factor depending on whether the consultant needs to move or even if the employees go offsite for training.

Fees and services are always said to include time and materials. The number of people involved in the implementation and the training will undoubtedly impact the budget. Hence, entirely depending on an organization’s Salesforce needs, the entire implementation could take the form of the bundled quote for a quick start implementation, or it could even be priced as a fixed estimate for the more complex implementations.

Hence, it can be considered that it’s critical to get the right people, especially the users to get involved during the discovery phase. Organizations, who introduce such features can always reduce the cost by gathering information both internally and also in the marketplace.

Any Salesforce development will always affect the price. The simpler the requirements, the cheaper will be the implementation cost. To simplify the setup requirement, it is always essential to make a list of requirements. For each element, it is required to note whether it’s a must-have, important, or nice-to-have. This will immediately nail down all the must-haves and help you the cost and complexity of the requirements.

Most important of all, it is important to ensure the implementation plan, which outlines the process for rolling out Salesforce across the organization. This is where the entire training and support comes in. Organizations who skip on training are often led to pay the high price of owning a great system that no one uses.

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